Norwich

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Advisory Board

Travis Morris, associate professor of criminology and criminal justice, is currently the director of Norwich University's Peace and War Center. The mission of the Center is to promote discussions and understanding of war and its effects, to convey that there is always a relationship between peace and war, and to advance interdisciplinary knowledge for students, scholars, and practitioners on the relationship between peace and war at local, national, and global levels. Morris holds a PhD from the University of Nebraska, an MS in criminal justice from Eastern Kentucky University, and a BA in criminology from Northern Illinois University. He was a Ranger-qualified Infantry Officer with the 10th Mountain Division, U.S. Army, and a police officer in Lexington, Ky. He teaches courses in terrorism, policing, homeland security, and criminology; his research interests include violent extremist propaganda analysis, information warfare, and comparative justice systems. He directed a NATO Science for Peace Program in Macedonia and leads an Israeli/Palestinian conflict field study funded by the Olmsted Foundation. He has published on the relationship between policing, peacekeeping, counterterrorism, and counter-insurgency, and has conducted ethnographic research in Yemen and published on how crime intersects with formal and informal justice systems in a socio-cultural context. His recent book, Dark Ideas, examines some of the leading ideas and ideologues that have shaped modern terrorism.

Yangmo Ku is an associate professor of political science and the acting director of the Peace and War Center at Norwich University. He received his BA in German Language and Literature from Sogang University in Seoul and earned his MA in International Affairs and PhD in Political Science from George Washington University. He taught at the School of International Service at American University before moving to Norwich in July 2012. Since then, he has taught various courses, including International Relations, Asian Politics, Intro to International Studies, International Law/Organizations, and US-China Relations. Dr. Ku’s research focuses on Korean politics, East Asian security, US foreign policy, and the politics of memory and reconciliation in East Asia and Europe. His coauthored book, titled Politics in North and South Korea: Political Development, Economy, and Foreign Relations, will be published by Routledge in December 2017. His previous research has also appeared in the Journal of East Asian Studies, Asian Perspective, Pacific Focus, Asian Journal of Peacebuilding, and the Yale Journal of International Affairs, as well as in two edited volumes on memory and reconciliation and North Korean nuclear issues.

Matthew A. Thomas is an assistant professor of Psychology at Norwich University. As an experimental psychologist who specializes in cognition, he teaches courses in Perception, Cognition, Experimental Psychology I/II along with guiding students through a rigorous three course thesis series based on original student research that culminates in presentations at the annual meeting of the Vermont Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has published work on a diverse range of topics, including word processing, semantic priming, object novelty and visual attention, and false memory paradigms. His current areas of research interest explore the automatic capture of visuospatial attention, rotary-wing aircraft cockpit design, and the influence of video games on attention and working memory. He earned his doctorate in Cognitive Psychology from the University at Albany.

Nicole DiDomenico serves as the Norwich University director of civic engagement, service-learning, and campus-community partnerships. She established the university’s Office of Volunteer Programs in 2002 and oversees what is now the Center for Civic Engagement, it’s on-going and one-time (on-campus and off-campus) local and domestic public service programs, events and clubs. In 2004, Ms. DiDomenico began Norwich University’ NU VISIONS Abroad program - a short-term international and interdisciplinary service-learning program focused on collaborative problem-solving with host community partners based on the needs expressed by the communities served. Since its inception, Ms. DiDomenico has since sent over 120 students to 7 countries on 18 international service trips to sites such as Tanzania, Viet Nam, the Philippines, Haiti, Nicaragua and others. She holds a Masters in Teaching with a concentration in Service-Learning from SUNY Plattsburgh (2002,) and a Masters of Public Administration with a track in Organizational Leadership from Norwich University (2015.) Her skillsets include conducting needs assessments in culturally diverse settings with diverse populations; harnessing the human and other available resources to address expressed needs; assessing site risk; planning group travel and logistics; event planning; fundraising; and leadership development. In her free time, she serves on the Upendo Mmoja Board of Directors, and is an active member of the Northfield Rotary Club.

Miri Kim is an assistant professor of history at Norwich University. Her work is centered on intercultural flows of ideas and materials in northeast China in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. As a China specialist with a lifelong interest in the study of languages as well as regional and world history, she is strongly committed to incorporating multiple perspectives and methods into her teaching as well as research. At Norwich, she teaches courses in the history of world civilizations, China, Japan, and East Asia that aim to engage students in the same way. She is the academic advisor for the Norwich University Model United Nations Club and is also active in fostering undergraduate research, guiding students on honors thesis and independent summer research projects that focus on Asian Studies topics. She attended the Inter-University Program for Chinese Language Studies at Tsinghua University, Beijing, after completing her B.A. in history at Reed College, and received her Ph.D. and M.A. in modern Chinese history from the University of California, Irvine.

David Last is an associate professor in the Department of Political Science at the Royal Military College of Canada, where he teaches comparative politics and graduate courses in conflict management and peacekeeping. He served for thirty years in the Canadian army, retiring at the rank of lieutenant colonel. He is a graduate of the Royal Military College of Canada (BA), Carleton University (MA), the London School of Economics (PhD, Commonwealth Scholar), and the US Army Command and General Staff College (MMAS). He served in uniform in Germany, Cyprus, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and has conducted research and taught in Israel-Palestine, Mongolia, West Africa, Botswana, Brazil, Indonesia, and Japan. His book, Conflict De-escalation in Peacekeeping Operations, is published by the Canadian Peacekeeping Press, and he has published more than forty chapters and articles on peacekeeping and various aspects of conflict management. His final three years in uniform were as the Registrar of the Royal Military College.Dr. Last’s research interests focus on the management and prevention of violence, third party intervention in protracted social conflict, and development of security professionals for the management of violence. Since 2009 he has led a project to enhance security education for police, paramilitary, and military professionals. In 2016, he was the Fulbright Scholar in Peace and War Studies, at the Peace and War Center in Norwich University.

Darlene Olsen is currently an associate professor of mathematics and the director of the Norwich University honors program. She has served on the faculty at Norwich University since 2006 and routinely teaches statistic courses such as Introductory Statistics for Criminal Justice majors, Statistics for Health Science majors and Statistical Methodology for STEM majors. Her current research areas are biostatistics and mathematics pedagogy. Dr. Olsen has received research grants through the Vermont Genetics Network, has served as a statistical consultant, and her work has been published in several research journals. Previously, she worked as a statistician for the New York State Department of Labor and taught at the University at Albany, Saint Michael’s College, Johnson State College, and the University of Vermont. Dr. Olsen received her doctorate in Mathematics from the University at Albany in 2003. She also has a Master of Science in Biometry and Statistics, a Master of Arts in Mathematics, both from the University at Albany, and a Bachelor of Arts in Mathematics from SUNY Geneseo.

Kyle Pivetti is an associate professor of English at Norwich University. He specializes in Renaissance literature, with special interests in adaptation studies, the history of nationalism, and memory studies. His first book, Of Memory and Literary Form: The Making of Nationhood in Early Modern England, examined the ways literary devices craft collective memory. With Professor John Garrison, he is the co-author of the forthcoming book, Shakespeare at Peace, an analysis of Shakespeare’s relationships to peacebuilding movements of both the Renaissance and the 21st century. His writing has been featured in journals such as Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism, Modern Philology, and Explorations in Renaissance Culture.

Steven Sodergren earned his doctorate in American and Military history from the University of Kansas in May 2006, having completed his Master of Arts in American history at Kansas five years earlier. Sodergren has been a fellow at the West Point Summer Seminar in Military History, and more recently participated in an NEH summer program in Savannah, Ga., exploring new approaches to the study of the Civil War. Since 2007, he has worked at Norwich University and was promoted to Associate Professor of History in 2013. He currently serves as the chair of the History and Political Science Department at Norwich. As the resident Civil War scholar at Norwich, he routinely teaches courses on the subject as part of the curriculum and conducts several public presentations of his work each year. Each summer he leads a group of Norwich students on staff rides to a range of Civil War battlefields, including the Wilderness, Spotsylvania, Cold Harbor, Fredericksburg, and Malvern Hill. Sodergren’s book, The Army of the Potomac in the Overland and Petersburg Campaigns: Union Soldiers and Trench Warfare, 1864-65, won the 2018 Colby Award, the first Norwich-associated work to do so.

Judith Stallings-Ward has published extensively on topics ranging from Cervantes’s Don Quixote, the poetry of Federico García Lorca, inter-art relations in the avant-garde poetry of Gerardo Diego, to the anarchism of Mahatma Gandhi and Buenaventura Durruti. She is associate professor of Spanish and Spanish Program Director at Norwich Unversity, where her most recent course deals with the literary and cultural representations of Mexican drug cartels. Her current book project focuses on Gerardo Diego’s masterpiece Fábula de Equis y Zeda. She holds a Ph.D. from Yale University, an M.A. from Middlebury, and a B.A. and B.J. from the University of Texas at Austin.

Lasha Tchantouridzé is professor and director of the graduate programs in Diplomacy and International Relations for the Norwich University College of Graduate and Continuing Studies. He is also a Davis Center Associate for Harvard University, and a Research Fellow for the Center for Defence and Security Studies, University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Canada. He earned his PhD in International Relations from Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada. Dr. Tchantouridzé’s research interests are at the intersection of diplomacy and force in international politics, and his academic publications are in the areas of geopolitics, Russian foreign policy, Canadian foreign policy, the Arctic, the Black Sea basin, international politics in the Caucasus, and NATO-Russia relations.